Identifying and Advocating Best Practices in the Criminal Justice System. A Texas-Centric Examination of Current Conditions, Reform Initiatives, and Emerging Issues with a Special Emphasis on Capital Punishment.

Wednesday, 27 February 2013

Oregon Repeal Legislation Heard

Death penalty opponents took their case to Oregon lawmakers Monday,
imploring a state House committee to allow the public to vote on
outlawing capital punishment.

The House Judiciary Committee took no action on the
measure, which would ask voters in 2014 whether to amend the state
constitution, making it illegal to execute anyone, including people
already on death row.

"My plea today, as a citizen of Oregon, is do not kill
in my name," said Aba Gayle of Silverton, whose 19-year-old daughter,
Catherine Blount, was murdered in 1980. "And most importantly of all, do
not tarnish the name of my beautiful daughter with another senseless
killing."

Her daughter's killer, Douglas Mickey, is on death row in California.

Terri Hakim disagrees. She doesn't want to see any
benefits for the father and son convicted of planting a bomb that killed
her husband, Oregon State Police Senior Trooper Bill Hakim, at a
Woodburn Bank in 2008.

House Joint Resolution 1 is a proposed constitutional amendment to
abolish the death penalty, which Oregon voters reinstated in 1984. If
lawmakers refer it and voters approve it in November 2014, the penalty
for aggravated murder — the only crime punishable by death — would
revert to life imprisonment.

Terri Hakim was the only witness to oppose the measure.

“If
these men were allowed back into the general (prison) population, they
are ‘heroes’ and will continue to teach their words of prejudice and
disregard for human life,” she said, referring to trial testimony about
the Turnidges’ anti-government views.

The
current debate was prompted by Gov. John Kitzhaber, who on Nov. 22,
2011, issued a reprieve blocking the scheduled execution of Gary Haugen
and vowed there would be no executions during his tenure. Haugen is
challenging his reprieve in court.

Kitzhaber was en route Monday from a conference in Washington, D.C.

But
in a letter to the committee, he said: “Courts are applying stricter
standards and continually raising the bar for prosecuting death penalty
cases. For a state intent on maintaining a death penalty, the inevitable
result will be bigger questions, fewer options and higher costs. It is
time for Oregon to consider a different approach.”

Kitzhaber started the current debate back on Nov. 22, 2011, when he
granted a temporary reprieve to twice-convicted murderer Gary Haugen,
two weeks before Haugen’s scheduled execution at the Oregon State
Penitentiary.

Haugen is challenging his reprieve. The Oregon Supreme Court hears the case on March 14.

Like
Douglas Franklin Wright and Harry Charles Moore, Haugen waived further
rights of appeal. Kitzhaber did not intervene in the two earlier cases,
and the executions by lethal injection proceeded in 1996 and 1997,
during his first term as governor.

“I have regretted those
choices ever since – both because of my own deep personal convictions
about capital punishment and also because, in practice, Oregon has an
expensive and unworkable system that fails to meet basic standards of
justice,” Kitzhaber wrote in his statement.

Kitzhaber’s reprieve
applied only to Haugen – he did not commute any of the sentences of the
36 men and one woman on death row – but he also vowed no executions
during his current tenure as governor.

The man who oversaw Oregon's last two executions at the Oregon
State Penitentiary said the death penalty fails to deter crime, does not
make the public any safer and forces prison officials into an untenable
position.

"Asking decent men and women to participate in the
name of a failed public policy that takes human life is indefensible and
rises to a level of immorality," said Frank Thompson, who was
superintendent of the penitentiary from 1994 to 1998.

Thompson
was one of more than a dozen people to testify in front of the House
Judiciary Committee Tuesday. All but one, the widow of an Oregon State
Police trooper who was killed in the 2008 Woodburn bank bombing, urged
the committee to move forward a resolution asking voters to repeal the
death penalty and replace it with a sentence of life in prison without
the possibility of parole.

But the bill, sponsored by Rep. Mitch Greenlick, D-Portland, faces long odds.

"I
don't know if it will progress past this point," said Rep. Jeff Barker,
D-Aloha, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee. He conceded that he
is "not a big supporter of changing" the law, which allows for capital
punishment in aggravated murder cases.

Bills to alter the death penalty have not made it out of committee in recent years.

More than a year ago, Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber stunned people
by enacting a moratorium on the death penalty. It happened just weeks
before the scheduled execution of two-time murderer Gary Haugen. At a
hearing Tuesday, lawmakers took up the question of whether to ask voters
to repeal the death penalty altogether. But it’s not clear whether that
will actually happen.

Dan Bryant knows the unique pain of learning a loved one has been
murdered. His mother was stabbed to death by a mentally-ill relative in
1998.

"Five years later, her killer died while under the care of the State
Hospital," Bryant says. "His death did nothing to bring closure, relief
or any sense of justice to me or my family."

Now, the Eugene minister is asking lawmakers to send a repeal of the
death penalty to Oregon voters. Ending capital punishment in Oregon
would have to be done at the ballot. That's because Oregon voters put it
in the state Constitution nearly 30 years ago.

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The StandDown Texas Project

The StandDown Texas Project was organized in 2000 to advocate a moratorium on executions and a state-sponsored review of Texas' application of the death penalty.
To stand down is to go off duty temporarily, especially to review safety procedures.

Steve Hall

Project Director Steve Hall was chief of staff to the Attorney General of Texas from 1983-1991; he was an administrator of the Texas Resource Center from 1993-1995. He has worked for the U.S. Congress and several Texas legislators. Hall is a former journalist.